


there’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on me

by orphan_account



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 23:10:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21243404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: ‘I’m gay.’ His eyes are so big. All his features are so there on his face. Eddie thinks he could print out his picture and cut out his nose and eyes and mouth and mix them up with a thousand other disembodied comedian-parts and he’d still spot any of them from across the room.





	there’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on me

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the Clown Posse group chat, from one e/R to another. 
> 
> What’s pacing, eh?

The sun streams through the hospital window and Eddie Kaspbrak squints into it.

In the corner, Richie dozes on the arm of a large chair.

It’s been five mornings in the hospital, and every one of them starts the same way. Eddie wakes up and sees his childhood best friend silhouetted against the window.

They don’t really know each other. Eddie doesn’t know why Richie is here, why he hasn’t gone home. _ Los Angeles _ , he thinks. _ City of fucking angels._ No, they don’t know each other. But in the Jade of the Orient it had kind of felt like they did. Eddie blinks hard and rubs the sleep out of his eyes.

__

When Richie’s sleeping, Eddie lets himself look. He sometimes sees another Richie sat in that chair, looking like he did _ that one summer _. There’s a double-vision to it that makes Eddie’s head hurt more than it probably should at this stage in his recovery. He remembers how Richie used to look when he was asleep in the hammock, or on Bill’s basement floor, snug in a blanket burrito. Kid Richie’s features overwhelmed his face, and they’re still so distinct but the angles settle on adult Richie’s face in a way that makes sense. He’s grown into his smile, his jawline, the big fucking glasses sit comfortably around his big fucking eyes. Eddie wonders now and then what Richie looked like in his twenties. He could Google, he supposes, but the wonder never lasts too long, too fixated on the real Richie in front of him. There’s another reason, too, but he doesn’t let himself land on it. Sometimes it feels like he’s circling it like a drain, then he quashes that thought too, for obvious reasons.

Richie shifts, and blinks into the streaming sun, reaching immediately for his glasses, sat on the window sill. He yawns wide, then greets Eddie with a sleepy smile. Eddie can’t remember if he ever did that before. In the mornings at Bill’s house someone would shake them both awake for pancakes, and _ what Richie looked like waking up _ wasn’t something to commit to memory. If he smiled then it was probably because of the pancakes.

Richie’s voice is hoarse and soft when he speaks. ‘Morning, honeybun. How’d you sleep?’

Eddie blushes and scowls. He’s already aware of how much Richie being here seems like some parody of marriage. He knows what the nurses assume and it makes him uncomfortable. Not comfortable either in raising his concerns, he says, ‘Oh you know, sweet morphine dreams.’ He goes to shift himself up the bed and winces with the effort. Richie is up and out of the chair and at his bedside before he can even process the pain. Richie helps him into position. Richie touches his shoulder softly, once and then it’s gone.

Richie makes him coffee, bustling as much as one can bustle in a hospital room devoid of niceties. He lifts the bed table up and over Eddie’s lap and sets the cup down.

‘I always thought I’d be the nurse, you know.’ There are flashbacks to the pharmacy, to helping dress Ben’s wounds, to Richie’s stupid voice. _ Nurse K _. ‘Maybe we could get you a nice outfit.’

‘Cheap joke, and kind of sexist.’ Richie grins, baiting him.

Eddie takes the bait. ‘Oh coming from _ you _ ? I’ve seen your routines.’ He’s looked them up on YouTube, watched them more than he’ll ever admit. When Richie’s out doing things, living his actual life away from this cloistered _ RichieandEddie _ space.

‘Maybe a bit homophobic, actually. Hey Eds, something funny about a man in a dress?’

‘Fuck off, dickwad.’

‘Drink your damn coffee.’

Richie’s humming loudly as he busies himself around Eddie’s bed, straightening the sheets despite the fact Eddie is still _ under them thank you very much _ and setting the flowers right in the vase because _ the nurse didn’t do it right _ and it’s all quite nice and Eddie feels very uneasy. He swallows. Richie hums louder, not exactly tuneless but loud in the stark hospital room.

'That’s real beautiful, Pavarotti.'

'Shut up, Kaspbrak,' and Eddie swears he’s blushing.

'Literally never.' It’s hard to look defiant from a hospital bed, and Eddie’s a little out of practice when it comes to glaring at Richie, but he’s got a good muscle memory.

Richie starts humming again, and Eddie drinks his damn coffee.

-

There’s a garden in the ward, and Richie wheels him out as the sun is setting. The wheels catch on the uneven paving and the edges of bushes in need of a trim brush the arms of Eddie’s cardigan. Bev’s cardigan, technically, since she declared none of Eddie’s clothes to be ‘cozy enough’ a couple of days before leaving town and dumped a bag of horribly expensive woolen garments at the foot of Eddie’s bed. Apparently she’s not that into clothes anyway, and ‘God knows why I became a fashion designer, Eddie, I feel like I’ve woken up from a fever dream.’

Richie soothes one of Eddie’s shoulders as he parks the chair. He was tensing up again, and the cardigan is really damn soft.

Adult Richie looks a little like kid Richie, in that moment.

Flowers are nice, he thinks, a little stunned and simple from the meds. He likes flowers. Real ones, vivid and imperfect, not the fake ones dotted about the apartment he shares with Myra, for decoration only. They’d never had plants in his mom’s house, either, never any growing, breathing things. He had allergies, he was too _ delicate _. But now he reaches out and lightly tugs a pale blue petal between finger and thumb, thinking that flowers are pretty delicate too.

-

The uneasiness isn’t hard to explain. Eddie understands himself pretty well in some respects even if he’s pretty lacking in the whole ‘paying attention to his entire sexuality’ thing. He’s scared because he doesn’t know what this means, Richie being here, taking care of him. Eddie probably shouldn’t mean as much to Richie as this: Richie taking a ‘hiatus’ from comedy and tending to some guy he used to know a long time ago. Eddie can look after himself, or ninety percent of himself. The nurses can help with the rest.

Eddie tries not to think about what he’d do if it were the other way around. The risks involved in that train of thought are multifarious and threatening.

Anyway, he shouldn’t be relying first and foremost on Richie _ or _ the nurses. He should call his wife.

Is it regression, nostalgia, they’ve not seen each other in twenty-seven years. They barely even know each other (and Eddie knows even as he thinks it that _ that _ part isn’t true).

They talk a lot in the hospital, but they don’t talk about The Past, not to start with. There’s too much of an overwhelming sense of _ loss _. It hurts, and it splits into two parts. Both of them hurt: Derry, and After Derry. A murderous clown, and twenty-seven years of amnesia.

-

He would’ve moved to LA, he realises mid-flight. If Richie had wanted that. As it is, they get in a taxi and pick up their keys and let themselves in and unpack. It’s a two bedroom apartment in New York, not half an hour from his _ wife _, and Eddie doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing but he knows he doesn’t want to go home. Not once since jumping on that flight out to Maine has he ever wanted to go home.

Boiling water for tea, he assesses the situation. He has feelings for Richie. He’s worried that his feelings for Richie are childish and crush-like, a remnant of how he felt as a kid. He can’t tell if they’re real, or if they’re serious enough, or if he’s chronically emotionally stunted.

It’s like having his first crush on a boy be on the first boy who’s nice to him, and Richie’s not even that nice to him. Also he’s not entirely sure Richie’s gay, though he has his suspicions. If he were, that might be worse, he knows you’re not supposed to fall for the first other gay person you meet after you come out just because it would be convenient. You’ve got to explore, or something. Also, Eddie’s not even out.

His brain screeches to a halt. This is the first time he’s been able to admit it to himself. He needs to leave his wife.

-

Eddie leaves his wife.

He spends ninety-nine percent of his time with Richie – which maybe isn’t completely okay, actually – but in that remaining percent he manages to do it. He makes the call and rings the buzzer and carries the boxes and weathers the storm.

Eddie leaves his wife, and they don’t talk about it.

-

What people never really got was that it wasn’t the germs, it was how they made him feel.

Eddie looks at the two ice cream cones, melting a little already and close to dripping on Richie’s hands. He’s on a strict no-dairy diet, and he hesitates. 'I’m not really that–'

'Come on Eds, it’s _ summer _ ,' Richie says, and Eddie’s heart _ aches _ for the look on his face. He takes one of the cones, which chooses that moment to drip onto his own hand, and he shivers.

-

Richie pauses the film and takes a deep, shuddering breath.

‘I’m gay.’ His eyes are so big. All his features are so _ there _ on his face. Eddie thinks he could print out his picture and cut out his nose and eyes and mouth and mix them up with a thousand other disembodied comedian-parts and he’d still spot any of them from across the room.

Eddie swallows, throat dry and weirdly itchy. ‘Me too’

So that’s that.

There are at least five blankets on the sofa and Richie pulls the most obviously fluffy towards him, long fingers playing with a corner. 'I haven’t had sex with anyone in years. I think I need to, like, _ feel things _ for it to matter.'

He shifts uncomfortably and Eddie can hear the words gone unsaid: _ did you fuck your wife? _ He’s grateful to Richie for not asking, he doesn’t think he’d answer if asked. As it is, having not been asked, he wants to tell him. ‘We don’t have sex. Myra and I. We didn’t, we haven’t––not in years.’

Richie nods. ‘Okay, Eds.’

But Eddie carries on, Richie’s easy understanding like a key in a lock. ‘It’s like, I look back at my life and I’m so embarrassed. It’s humiliating. I feel like I’m seeing myself for the first time, or I’m seeing someone else, I wanna go back and shake him. _ What do you think you’re doing, you idiot? _ Why did nobody shake me?’

He’s not really asking, but Richie answers anyway. ‘I would’ve shaken you.’

Eddie swallows. ‘I know. I think that’s what hurts the most.’

‘I’ll shake you now,’ Richie jokes, making a jerky shaking motion with both hands, but his heart’s not in it, Eddie can tell.

‘I think we’re both shaken enough.’ Eddie wishes he could lighten the conversation. Or take out a paddle ball and bounce it at Richie’s face, maybe do a dance.

Richie seems similarly at sea. ‘So what now, do we like, hug? Cut a cake? Are there balloons? Hey, it’s Pride season right? Let’s get a flag and hang it from the window––’

‘A hug would be great, Rich.’ He should’ve expected the conversation to go this way. He supposes he did, and he supposes that’s why it was so easy to have it.

What he doesn’t expect is for Richie to look so immediately solemn, so serious as he sets the blanket to one side and shuffles along so that their thighs are touching. It’s a little awkward twisting torsos into place but then Richie’s hand goes around Eddie’s waist in a surprisingly smooth slide and he doesn’t think either of them are even breathing.

He’s got hands running over his back and a face buried in his shoulder and when Richie finally inhales it’s like he’s trying to breathe Eddie himself in with the air. They stay like that for a long time.

When they separate, they don’t go far.

‘If we’d really had that conversation when we were fifteen, there’s one more thing I’d have wanted to say.’

‘Go on.’

‘Eddie Kaspbrak, I have a huge crush on you.’

‘How embarrassing for you,’ Eddie says, on instinct. He can’t stop smiling.

-

They’re out for a walk in the park. All the actual teenagers are on skateboards or scooters or, Eddie notices on one occasion, shoes with wheels, which is terrifying and probably not good for supporting one’s arches. The two of them, fake teenagers, amble along towards the duck pond at a leisurely pace. A bag of seed swings at Richie’s side.

Richie thinks Eddie’s cute feeding the ducks.

'What?'

'You love those fucking ducks. Ha, ducking fucks,' he finger-guns and Eddie shakes his head fondly. 'It’s cute, Eds.'

‘Shut up Richie, I’m not cute,’ but it’s said without irritation, without the _ oh my God shut up _ of thirty years ago. ‘I’m old.’

It’s sad. It sounds really sad. But Richie’s smiling at him and kicking at the ground with the toe of one shoe.

'You’re fucking adorable, dude.'

Eddie blushes, and okay, yeah, he feels a little bit fourteen years old. Then Richie’s blushing too and looking at the patch of earth he’s intent on destroying and he’s adorable too. It’s ridiculous, they’re behaving like teenagers. Eddie doesn’t want to be a teenager again. He just wants to feel comfortable in his fucking skin.

He doesn’t want it to be like this, with Richie. He doesn’t want whatever this is between them to only serve as a reminder for everything they could have had twenty-seven years ago.

They spend the whole day at the park, and Eddie tries as best he can to assuage the anxieties of a ‘wasted day’ with the knowledge that he has to get back to work soon, and he should make the most of the sunshine. He has no idea how Richie’s swinging all this time off, but he does catch him up at weird hours of the night (when he’s going for a piss), typing away at something. It’s his own material.

When they get home, Eddie goes to make an herbal tea and Richie heads for the couch. They sit on the couch, watch some old SNL Richie’s recorded, and when their eyes get heavy, they don’t try to keep them open. They fall asleep doing what could only be described as ‘cuddling’ to an outside observer. Richie has one arm loosely curled around Eddie’s back, and Eddie, on his side and leaning into Richie, has one arm slung across Richie’s chest.  
  
Eddie presses snooze on his phone the next morning. Just ten more minutes.

-

They go to Five Guys. They’ve just ordered their food when Richie drags them over to an exceedingly elaborate soda machine, face lit up.

‘Geez, Tozier, you wanna come here for your birthday?’ Eddie points at the machine, one eyebrow raised. Richie doesn’t seem to be paying much attention, gaze trained on the vast array of choices adorning the display. But then he shrugs and pushes his glasses up from where they’ve been slipping in one awkward motion.

‘It’s just nice, you know, doing all this shit with you. We kind of missed out.’

‘Missed out on what?’

Richie looks momentarily sad, but he grabs a cup. ‘Lots of things, Eds.’

‘What are you talking about, Richie?’ he rolls his eyes but there’s no bite in his voice. Instead he feels very fond watching this six foot loser in beat-up Chucks pressing buttons with a series of dramatic flourishes and mixing several sodas together.

‘Puberty, Eds. It’s like we get to do it all over again, but do it right this time.’ He punches a straw through the cup. Eddie thinks about the fucking clown, of how much he wishes they’d done it right the first time. He thinks about Stan.

‘We’re forty-one, Rich.’ His voice breaks a little.

But Richie’s answering smile is easy and warm, and his voice is steady when he speaks. ‘Eddie, I feel younger than I’ve felt in years.’

It settles around them, the weight of those words, as they slide into a booth. Eddie is suddenly so aware of his legs, unsure how to arrange them under the table. Is that a problem forty-one year old men typically have?

They eat their burgers in companionable silence, but Eddie’s brain is loud and stuck on the way Richie says his name.

-

Eddie doesn’t correct Richie on his incessant nicknames as much, now. He’s too caught up in the miracle of the two of them being there at all, alive and clown-free. Richie finds it strange, and he says as much.

'Hey Eds,' he waits a beat. Eddie just looks up from the vegan cheese he’s grating and raises an eyebrow. 'Yeah, see, that’s weird. Why are you suddenly so chill?'

Eddie laughs, all toothy, because that’s hilarious. ‘I’m not chill.’

‘Yeah but the nicknames,’ Richie presses on, more genuinely curious than amused.

‘Feels comfortable,’ and Eddie tries not to let that feel like a bad thing. He’s spent the better part of his life (and that’s an understatement) in a near overwhelming state of discomfort. It’s getting harder to think through these things, kid Richie and adult Richie blending into one. The only place he felt comfortable as a kid was with the Losers, most of all with Richie, so he associates being comfortable with being there, and then, and young, and _ not who he is now _. He doesn’t have to be a therapist to work that one out. But he wants to be able to come to terms with himself as an adult, he needs that. He needs to grow up, move on. But now that he remembers what it is he’s supposed to be moving on from, it’s a whole lot more complicated.

There’s a beat, and Richie smiles. ‘Yeah, it does.’

-

It’s been two months since Eddie got out of the hospital and he’s able to do more strenuous activities again, so they’re playing some video games.

Eddie throws his controller down.

It’s Richie’s stubble that does it. Eddie can’t stop staring at it. He wants to touch it, curl his hand around the cut of Richie’s jaw and smooth his fingers across it. He wants to feel it catch on his skin. His fingers but also his face. _ Beard burn _ , Eddie thinks, and shudders warmly about it. Beard burn from a man, with a beautiful stubbly face. With that thought, the spell is broken. It’s not regression. This isn’t the memory of feeling things for Richie, the pale facsimile of a childhood crush. Eddie _ wants _him.

He realises he’s not moved an inch since throwing the controller on the floor, though Richie jumped a mile. How can he have been so still when so much seismic movement has happened inside his head. He looks at Richie, who looks back at him like he’s completely lost it.

Before Richie can ask any questions about Eddie’s newfound hatred of _ Simpsons Hit and Run _ , Eddie shuffles forward and puts one hand awkwardly on his knee. It’s warm, and Eddie wants to lay down on it, nuzzle against it, but instead he leans in and kisses Richie, like it’s been this simple all along. Richie doesn’t pull away, he doesn’t seem particularly shocked, he just cups Eddie’s face in one hand and sighs into his mouth. There’s that stubble burn already. Eddie is fizzing with it, knowing Richie’s feeling his stubble in turn. Then there’s _ everything else _. His hands and his eyelashes and his hair and his lips. Richie’s face is rough but his lips are so, so soft.

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut like he could capture this moment with a shutter click. He’d live in it, maybe, if he didn’t think there were a whole host of challengers to the throne of ‘best feeling in the world’ lurking out there.

Then they pull back, and Richie’s glasses are a little fogged but Eddie can see how blown his pupils are when he asks. 'Can you take me on a date?'

He snorts. 'That’s a really weird way of asking someone out.' But Richie seems really serious all of a sudden, and his hands are clenched in the sleeves of his sweater which he’s pulled down over them so he’s got little paws. It’s distractingly cute.

His voice, though. It’s insistent. 'No, Eddie. I really want to be taken on a date. By you.'

It’s Richie’s eyes, again, so big and honest, and his stupid fucking stubble. How does he not look totally homeless? _ Okay, that’s mean, _ both to Richie and to homeless people, Eddie berates himself. He watches Richie’s tongue nervously darting out to wet his lips. His very soft lips. 

'Shit,' Eddie breathes, ever the eloquent one. 'I mean, yeah. Let me take you out.'

'Pick me up at eight,' Richie says, with the air of a Victorian gentlewoman, and fucking _ flounces _ off to his room, door swinging shut behind him.

Eddie palms his face and cracks up laughing.

-

He ‘takes’ Richie to a restaurant of Richie’s own choosing, fancier than Five Guys but not exactly haute cuisine. Somehow despite their respective salaries neither of them have developed a taste for what he’s heard Richie call ‘bougie vegetables’ (‘Seriously Eds, the portions are so small, and all that _ arranging _, it’s like edible art. That’s not food!’) Still, they order off menus and taste their wine, swilling it around and pretending to smell it, before nodding for a full glass each.

It is, to all intents and purposes, a date. But it carries with it none of the anxieties of one, it feels just like hanging out with a friend. Eddie thinks, he doesn’t have that many friends, really it just feels like hanging out with Richie which is a singular experience. He wonders if it shouldn’t feel more like a date, if he should he be more nervous. Then Richie catches his hand when he’s reaching for the bread basket, and Eddie thinks about the kiss, and how much he wants to kiss him again.

The food is nice. Neither of them mention it. It’s not important.

‘Thank you for taking me out tonight, Eddie,’ Richie teases.

A server appears. ‘Would you gentlemen like to see the dessert menu?’

Eddie is about to say yes when Richie says ‘No.’ It’s very firm.

When he looks at him there’s that heat again.

‘Just the check please,’ Eddie smiles, and then downs the rest of his wine as the waiter walks away.

They walk home from the restaurant because it’s really not much of a walk but the tension is unbearable and Eddie finds himself playing with his phone in his pocket, wanting to call a cab. He nearly pushes Richie up against a tree or a lamppost on several occasions and only manages to restrain himself out of lingering small town cautiousness and the fact he has no idea what he’s doing. Actually pretty big reasons, but the tree-pushing urge is still there, simmering.

Richie scoops up Eddie’s hand from where it’s bean swinging at his side and lifts it to his lips. He doesn’t even look at Eddie, and he’s trembling a little, and Eddie thinks it’s the bravest thing he’s ever seen, small town or New York or anywhere. Then Richie’s lips brush his knuckles, just once, before dropping his hand again, and the simmering becomes a burn.

He marches them home.

They don’t immediately fall into bed together; nobody gets shoved up against a wall; nobody goes to their knees in the hallway. They’re both quiet, so quiet, and neither one follows the other over to the couch, they both go together.

It’s quiet, and Richie pours them both a bourbon for some reason. He doesn’t drink bourbon. Apparently this is a bourbon moment, though.

Eddie is worried about the prospect of sex. He’s worried this relationship, this–– whatever it is. He’s worried it’s going to be steeped in nostalgia and regression. That it’ll be bad, that maybe that aren’t capable of loving each other as they are _ now _ because they’re holding on so tightly to what they were _ then _, now that they can remember it. He remembers what Richie said the other day, about doing puberty all over again ‘but doing it right this time’ and his chest grows tight, the ghost of an asthma attack. He doesn’t want to do it all over again, he wants to do something else.

Richie returns the bourbon to wherever the fuck _ that _ came from and brings out a CD. It’s not a cassette tape – Eddie knows he left a lot of shit behind in Derry when he left for college – but it looks homemade, and there’s a handwritten tracklisting on the case. He sips at his bourbon.

The music starts up and Eddie huffs a laugh before catching Richie’s eye, and there’s nothing funny there. He’s heard this song a million times, but he feels like he should be listening to it this time.

_ I get up in the evening and I ain’t got nothing to say–– _

Richie is looking absolutely anywhere but right at Eddie, and Eddie can’t take his eyes off him. He’s never been one for big emotional reactions to music. Probably because he’s super fucking repressed. But Richie’s always been repressed in a different way, it seems, because Eddie remembers him being so full of everything as a kid and so hungry for more of it all. Music, comics, pulp fiction, he thinks he even remembers one time catching him holed up in the hammock with a big old copy of _ Moby Dick _. Richie loved everything, and it was so fucking unfair that the world kept hating him back.

But here he was, still, clearly feeling something in this song, a little bit in love with this song, and Eddie wants to join him right there at the centre of it.

He sees Richie’s eyes flutter closed when Springsteen sings _ I’m just about starving tonight–– _

Eddie shuts the CD player off before the song can finish, he knows how it ends, and he can’t wait any longer. He reaches for Richie and feels himself being reached for too. It’s beautiful symmetry, a great fucking sigh of relief.

The hair at the back of Richie’s neck is long enough to thread his fingers through, so Eddie does. The juncture of Richie’s neck and shoulder looks like a very good place to kiss, so Eddie does. Richie’s hips are begging to be grabbed, to be squeezed, so Eddie _ does _.

When they’re both shirtless, Richie sits back and smiles, seemingly to himself, and Eddie thinks he’s about to make a dumb joke or callback or something. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he says instead, and ducks down to unzip Eddie’s pants.

Richie kisses his way higher, mouthing messily at every inch of skin he can get at and Eddie can already feel the beginnings of beard burn on his thighs and the thought of that makes him throb all over. The thought of Richie makes him throb all over. Richie as he is, right now, kissing his hip bones so tenderly and clutching at his arms with large, hot hands. The importance of that sings through the muddle of Eddie’s mind, and he holds onto it: Richie as he is right now. Not as he was back then. Eddie’s not clinging to kid Richie right now – leaving aside the fact that it would be fucking weird and okay, switching tracks now – no, instead the world has shrunk exponentially over the course of the past ten minutes, focused in on the man between his legs and oh, there, Eddie is throbbing again. Not with nostalgia, or the sadness of missed opportunities or the melancholy complexity of repressed sexuality, but with _ want _.

‘I want you,’ he whispers. Richie lifts his head and meets his eyes, and Eddie tries again. ‘I want you.’ No need for quiet. Not when Richie looks so surprised, and Eddie thinks he has to spend the rest of his life making sure that it’s never surprising again. He’s going to make it so fucking normal, he wants Richie to expect it, he’s going to want him so much it becomes boring. 'Richie, I–'

But Richie drops his head back down and hisses into Eddie’s hip bone. 'I want you so much it hurts.'

Eddie is completely done. He grasps at Richie’s shoulders and hauls him up the bed so that he’s hovering over him and groans with it, with how completely surrounded he is, Richie’s arms Richie’s legs Richie’s eyes so wide and attentive and he’s so, so done. He reaches up, fists Richie’s hair, brings him right down close. ‘Then fucking do something about it.’

So much of love is supposed to be reverence and whispers. Eddie’s seen enough films about forbidden love to know. People confess their love in morse code through the wall between them or pass notes in the halls. They tell people on their deathbeds, sentence half finished, eyes half closed. Eddie doesn’t want it. He wants loud ecstatic worship now, he wants a feedback loop of noise, symbiosis, a big communicative bubble of nothing else at all. Eddie wants Richie to _ know _.

Then they’re both naked, and Richie doesn’t take his glasses off, he really does need them to see, and Eddie feels them catching on his bare skin like a reminder of who he’s doing this with. He loves the reminders, keeps repeating in his head _ Richie Richie Richie _ and then there’s a shift and Richie’s hard against him and he hisses ‘ _ Richie _’.

They shift, and touch, and shift again, and Eddie can’t settle he can’t fucking choose he wants to be everywhere in the bubble all at once. He finds himself obsessed with the hair on Richie’s legs, the curve of his stomach, the small scars occasionally flecking his skin, from cooking or clumsy drunken stumbles home or whatever other trivial little accidents make up a lifetime of existing in a body and _ fuck _ Eddie wants to know the story behind every single one.

He feels like he’s already right on the edge when Richie takes him in his mouth, tongue messy and curling impossibly around him. His hands are back in Richie’s hair and his legs start to twitch. Richie’s eyes flick up to meet his and it’s like all the porn he’s never watched but so much better because it’s Richie and he looks nothing like a porn star and everything like a forty-one year old dad on vacation and Eddie groans. Then Richie reaches a hand under and behind and just circles, lightly, mouth still delicious around him and of all the new sensations they’ve been collecting together Eddie thinks this one might be his favorite. Writhing in five directions at once, his breath hitching, he thinks it was never like this oh Jesus it was never like _ this. _

When he comes he grips Richie’s head so hard he’s surprised he doesn’t draw blood. Richie just swallows, looks at Eddie the whole time, blush high on his cheeks. When he pulls off he’s trembling more than Eddie is.

Eddie reaches for him, beckons him hastily upwards so Richie’s chest hovers just above his own. Then he reaches between his legs, and relishes as Richie struggles to hold himself up. It doesn’t take long, but Eddie is greedy for more of those words punched out of him between heaving gasps. ‘Oh God, Eddie, _ fuck _––I can’t believe this–’ 

When Richie comes, he screams. Pure, wordless noise into Eddie’s chest, and Eddie can’t see his face but he can feel the damp on his skin and knows Richie is crying even before he’s finished, pulsing between them and clinging to the sheets. Eddie can’t see his face and wishes he could but it’s still so beautiful, all of it. He feels so beautiful.

-

They cuddle after. They cuddle so hard.

'Remember when Stan taught us about symbiotic relationships?'

'Yeah, I liked the thing about the clownfish and–'

'The anemone, yeah,' and Eddie doesn’t really mind when Richie interrupts anymore, not like this. He’s speaking so softly, voice all rough and low and Eddie is beside himself just listening to him, how he sounds and what he has to say are both of paramount importance. He must be losing his mind.

'What about them?' He swallows. The words _ clown fish _ swim around at the back of his consciousness but he ignores them. Stupid clown.

'Is it super unhealthy to say I’d give anything to be a clown fish to you?'

'Unhealthy?'

'Like, codependent. I don’t want you to feel like I’m smothering you, or, I don’t know, fuck. You’ve got a history, Eds. I don’t want to be, what’s that thing, a tragedy or a farce?' It’s like he’s trying to express his feelings in the most roundabout way possible.

Eddie knows how he feels. 'I’m pretty sure we’re already both, man.'

Richie grimaces. 'Sorry.'

Reaching up, Eddie brushes a lock of hair out of Richie’s eyes. 'No. You don’t apologise to me. Why don’t you ask the anemone how he feels?'

When will the words stop _ weighing so much _? 'How does he feel?'

The hair on Richie’s chest is so soft, like so much of him, like Eddie keeps discovering to his delight, and more pressingly his arousal. He strokes it, studying the curve of a pectoral, the way it moves with every nervous breath. 'Like that clown fish can stick around for as long as he likes.'

Richie’s eyes water. They fucking sparkle. 'I think he’d like to stay a real long time, Eds.'

It’s sort of perfect, like something out of a movie, something he might have dreamed about when he was a kid if he’d let himself have dreams. If there’d been movies like this. He doesn’t tell Richie this, thinking he’ll keep some of tonight to himself, just for him. 'I don’t think Facebook have an ‘it’s symbiotic’ setting.'

They roll over and have sex again and Eddie supposes what Richie said at Five Guys last week was right, that this is a little bit like puberty, or what it might have been like if he’d allowed himself to feel desire. But fuck, he _ desires _ Richie now.

He desires him right up against the headboard, into the small hours, and the sun rises to Richie on his knees, Eddie pulled to the very edge of the bed, desired right out of his mind.

They sleep in, and Eddie doesn’t snooze his alarm this time. He turns it off.

-

After all the fish talk they think about going to the aquarium, but decide against it when they remember the concept of tunnels.

They go bowling. It’s Eddie’s first time. They didn’t have a bowling alley in Derry, but he doesn’t think they’d have gone if there had been one. They spent most of their time trying to get away from the places where the other kids were hanging out.

It’s only after they’ve paid that he realises neither of them have considered having to change shoes. It’s not even the fact they’re tiny hothouses of other people’s foot germs. It’s the other thing.

But Richie just howls with laughter, grabs a shoe and holds it up for Eddie to see. ‘_Clown shoes_,’ he declares, and shakes his head, still heaving. His eyes, though. They ask an important question, they give him the option. They’re keeping perfect pace with everything racing through his head. Eddie just rolls his eyes and smirks, pretending his heart isn’t beating like it is, out of his fucking chest. They’re in silent agreement to stay and eat cheap nasty hot dogs and wear the damn shoes. Safety first, and isn’t that ironic.

He crouches to untie his laces. Richie looks at him like he hung the moon or some shit. Eddie blinks, hard.

He decides not to think about how many people have touched the bowling balls.

It’s fun. They have to negotiate some stuff, because there’s always going to be stuff to negotiate, but Eddie’s becoming increasingly okay with that. It’s early days but he thinks it’s okay, unspoken but acknowledged between them as they decide to put the rails up because they don’t want the garish score screen yelling _ GUTTER BALL _ at them. That would hit too close to home.

But it’s fun. They order cheap nasty hot dogs and a couple of beers, too, because they’re doing their stupid teenage summer but they’re also stupid old men and Eddie lets himself go rough around the edges, tells Richie _ I fucking hate you _ when he deliberately distracts his preparation before every single ball. He treads the familiar ground of flicking Richie’s glasses off with his foot, meeting every ‘your mom’ joke with another ‘your mom’ joke, pulling his Goddamn pigtails. Every carefully cultivated image of himself as a quiet man, nobody to pick out in a crowd, ever the people pleaser; it all falls to the wayside. He lets himself be a bit less chill and a little bit _ too much _ and still he gets the feeling that Richie can never get enough.

Because he recognises it. He knows how that feels now too, not being able to get enough of someone. Richie’s changed so much. It’s not that he’s kinder – he was always kind – but that he’s softer. The kind of knowing that comes from hurt, and Eddie doesn’t want Richie to hurt, but he wants to be known. He’s the same in lots of the same ways that meant Eddie had a crush on him when they were kids, and he’s different in all the ways that set Eddie’s heart on wings as a grown man. The knowledge that these two people are the same person neatly sews those feelings up, ties a bow around them, and sets them on Eddie’s lap. The label reads ‘DO SOMETHING.’

It means something, to want to be around someone this much, just as they are. Eddie thinks if they hadn’t lost those twenty-seven years he’d feel the same way. He’d want Richie just as much, forty-one and smiling.

When he gets a strike, Richie runs at him, picks him up and spins him round. There are families staring, kids bug-eyed at the scene they make, two stiff-legged men cheering and punching the air like teenagers. Then Richie _ picks him up _ like it’s nothing and it’s everything, Eddie can’t touch the ground but he feels so solid, so held. Richie is ridiculous, and so is he, and when he’s set back down again and the world stops spinning and the pins are being set down for Richie’s turn he cradles Richie’s stupid stubbly face in both hands and says ‘I’m in love with you.’

Richie looks a bit like he’s been cracked open and put back together again, sunny and bright. He looks Eddie straight in the eye, unwavering, and says ‘Thank you.’ His voice is thick and Eddie can still feel the eyes of a hundred children on them, so he unhands Richie’s face and heads back to the booth. It takes a moment for Richie to refocus, but then he’s collecting his ball and tossing a wicked grin over his shoulder and backing up with a wiggle, camp and exaggerated, and Eddie picks up the rest of his hot dog and _ whoops _ and falls in love again and again.

-

It’s later that night that Richie can’t stop saying it. 'I love you,’ he breathes into Eddie’s hair, hands all over him, his back and his ass and the sides of his waist.

They’re both delirious.

Then Richie says ‘Fuck me,’ and all the air leaves Eddie’s lungs in one fell swoop.

‘I’ve never––’

‘Eddie, I know. You don’t have to.’

‘No, Rich, I want to.’

Richie’s eyes are so dark, his voice hoarse. ‘Then, please––’ he cuts off on a quiet moan and parts his thighs, lets Eddie settle more solidly between them, and Eddie feels the hard press of him against his stomach and has to close his eyes.

Eddie works him open with slow, inexpert strokes, trusting that Richie will tell him if he does something wrong.

Richie bears down and Eddie sees in two dimensions, one of them a cosmic, star-speckled realm beyond all sense and the other completely saturated with the man underneath him, his eyelashes, his long legs coming up around them both. Eddie presses in further, a little more insistent, paying such careful attention––to Richie’s breathing, and to the flush of sweat across his collarbone. There’s something about that play of light. He doesn’t want to forget it.

Richie’s knees hurt, after, from the sex and the bowling and the sex.

-

They go to work. Or, Eddie goes to work and Richie goes to the _ study _, which Eddie keeps reminding him should stay a study and not an extra sex room. He always seems to be saying it while straddling Richie on the big office chair, but he says it all the same.

Richie keeps talking about getting a clownfish. Eddie’s had experiences with exposure therapy before, and he doesn’t buy it, but he can see the humour, and he likes fish.

He can feel there’s less pent-up frustration, less yelling, less ‘Edward Kaspbrak speaking’ and more ‘Hello, this is Eddie.’ He’s angry, but it’s channelled elsewhere, a geyser pointed at a particular target. There is so much to be angry about, after all. So much to be sad about, too. He’s known both of those things all his life but he’s never felt that there’s so much to be happy about.

They do their accounting, they cook with shiitake mushrooms and real cooking wine and Richie learns the difference between all the knives in the knife block. They put on _ Gremlins _. Eddie remembers watching it once at Bill’s, all of them together, and it doesn’t feel like regression, or nostalgia. It doesn’t feel like either of them looking back, to remember and to carry on anyway.

‘You asshole, get your feet out of my face.’

It feels like both of them looking forward.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading my magnum opus please listen to Lucy Dacus’ cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing In The Dark.
> 
> I'm 1esknineteen on Tumblr.


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